We wanted to give you a rundown of what’s in store, along with particular insight into two of the workshops we’re most excited to have lined up for Gold and VIP attendee s—one session with Jez Humble on implementing continuous delivery and one with Alistair Croll on Lean analytics for corporate entrepreneurs. To demonstrate the kind of thing we have in mind, we spoke to Jez Humble, who will lead a workshop, Continuous Delivery: Deploy Safer, Learn Faster. MORE

In which Etsy transforms its app release process by aligning it with its philosophy for web deploys. Deploying code should be easy. It should happen often, and it should involve its engineers. For Etsyweb, this looks like continuousdeployment. MORE

Case Study: Continuousdeployment makes releases n. Towards a new entrepreneurship ▼ 2009 (88) ► December (4) Continuousdeployment for mission-critical applica. Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, August 3, 2009 Minimum Viable Product: a guide One of the most important lean startup techniques is called the minimum viable product. Its power is matched only by the amount of confusion that it causes, because its actually quite hard to do. MORE

Etsy engineers have a wide variety of backgrounds, strengths, and weaknesses, so there are no engineering skills we can take for granted. And there are things you can’t just assume engineers will learn for themselves because you throw a codebase and a workflow at them. To that end, I recently wrote two “Testing 101″ materials for use by all Etsy engineers. MORE

Finding great engineers is hard; figuring out whos good is even harder. For software engineers, I think this absolutely has to be a programming problem solved on a whiteboard. I have found this quite rare in engineers. Many of us engineers are strong introverts, without fantastic people skills. To test for empathy, I always make sure that engineers have one or two interviews with people of wildly different background, like a member of our production art department. MORE

We also deployed the site to production 517 times with changes from over 70 unique individuals. We’ve written about how we do it here on Etsy’s engineering blog (look here , here , and here for a sampling) but we’ve never explained it all in one place, in person, with free beer. “ContinuousDeployment: the Why and How (Kellan Elliott-McCrea, VP of Engineering). Members of the Etsy engineering team will be hanging out. MORE

In addition to our production infrastructure, every engineer and designer also have their own VM to develop on the Etsy stack (see this post for details). We have about 30 engineers regularly making changes to our cookbooks. For infrastructure changes we have the same continuousdeployment mentality. continuouslydeployed. hide a change behind a rollout flag and makes it easier for engineers that are. engineering infrastructure operations MORE

by Samantha Lynch & Elizabeth Trongone Having prior product management experience in companies like Birchbox, Warby Parker and Group Commerce, we sought to continue to hone our product management skills through the lens of Launching Technology Ventures. Throughout our time working with Threadflip, we collected learnings on working with engineers, recruiting users and administering tests and interviews. Certain critical pain points and areas of confusion came up continuously. MORE

In this post we explore some of the engineering challenges we faced in building a social commerce feature like the gift recommender. At Etsy, we build our system in a continuouslydeployed environment which allows us to quickly iterate and experiment. This holiday season we launched a redesigned version of a product we call “Gift Ideas for Your Friends”. MORE

If you aren’t familiar with Deployinator, it’s a tool we wrote to deploy code to Etsy.com. We deploy code about 40 times per day. Within Deployinator, we call each of these independent deployments “stacks”. Deploys are now separate unix processes with descriptive proc titles. MORE

They form an important part of our continuousdeployment pipeline along with one-button deploys, fast unit and functional tests, copious amounts of graphing, and a fantastic development environment to make sure code flows safely and securely to production. Nothing particularly exotic but they help make the code readable and consistent across an ever growing engineering department. engineering infrastructure security MORE

Over the years, our product, engineering, and member-facing organizations have developed practices and approaches to support our community during the intensity of the holidays. Engineers went from deploying five times a day to once a day. MORE

Continuousdeployment, the practice of pushing your code live the moment its ready, is absolutely essential for product hackers. engineering people philosophy bad idea mean time between failures meaningless death MORE

That is, once you’re no longer a small company and you have some success, how do you execute and continue to grow through innovation? We work in prototypically four-week iterations, with quality engineers and software developers working in close collaboration. Here''s the simplest form of that cycle: Week -1 - Planning/End-of-Cycle - Software engineers are planning: writing specifications, doing light prototyping, and experimentation. MORE

In the last few years Agile and “ContinuousDeployment” has replaced Waterfall and transformed how companies big and small build products. But businesses are finding that ContinuousDeployment not only changes engineering but has ripple effects on the rest of its business model. MORE

And they can benefit from the speed and discipline of starting with a minimum viable product and then learning and iterating continuously. Many lean startups are ambitious and are able to deploy large amounts of capital. Case Study: Continuousdeployment makes releases n. MORE

So, in the example above, wed have to take five corrective actions: bring the site back up remove the bad code help so-and-so understand why his code doesnt work as written train so-and-so in the principles of TDD change the new engineer orientation to include TDD I have come to believe that this technique should be used for all kinds of defects, not just site outages. By continuously adjusting, we eventually build up a robust series of defenses that prevent problems from happening. MORE

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, June 15, 2009 Why ContinuousDeployment? Of all the tactics I have advocated as part of the lean startup , none has provoked as many extreme reactions as continuousdeployment , a process that allows companies to release software in minutes instead of days, weeks, or months. My previous startup, IMVU , has used this process to deploy new code as often as an average of fifty times a day. MORE

As the CTO/VP Engineering, I was the worst offender. That means that I (and other engineers) were able to participate in the problem team discussions. Such discussions would have been impossible in our execution-oriented engineering team meetings. Most engineers naturally think about repurposing the technology platform, and this is a common pattern. As an engineer thinking of doing a startup applying Steven's approach, your teachings are pure gold! MORE

The numerous jobs on our dashboard were great for pinpointing where the failures were, but it was difficult to determine at which stage of the deploy pipeline the failures existed. We needed some way to communicate the test status at each stage of the deployment pipeline. MORE

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, January 18, 2010 Case Study: Continuousdeployment makes releases non-events The following is a case study of one entrepreneurs transition from a traditional development cycle to continuousdeployment. MORE

At Etsy, it’s not just engineers who write and deploy code – our designers and product managers regularly do too. In the past year, 70 employees have completed engineering rotations. This includes time spent training and the deploy itself. MORE

I break the answer to that question down into three engines: Viral - this is the business model identified in the presentation as "Get Users." Thats why eBay advertises on search engines, and Facebook doesnt. Labels: search engine marketing 0comments: New comments are not allowed. Case Study: Continuousdeployment makes releases n. Towards a new entrepreneurship ► 2009 (88) ► December (4) Continuousdeployment for mission-critical applica. MORE

In the talk, I go into the philosophical reasons why continuousdeployment makes engineers happy, how radically decentralizing authority and thinking of your team as a community optimize for happiness, and the how our approach to tooling makes everything work. engineering philosophy videoA few weeks ago, I gave a talk at Railsconf in Baltimore about how we optimize for developer happiness at Etsy. MORE

Editor’s Note: The following is a guest post by James Donelan , the VP of engineering at MuleSoft , provider of the world’s most widely used integration platform. Use a continuous delivery model to release new features quickly with the least amount of friction. MORE

Continuing down this path we would have exhausted space and power in our datacenters. It’s tied into our continuousdeployment system, moving along with up to 60 deploys per day for etsy.com. api engineering infrastructure mobile operations philosophy API PHP MORE

PayPal, under the leadership of David Marcus and Bill Scott, re-defining and re-engineering itself by embracing Lean Startup to improve the product experience. My personal background was as an engineer and my companies had been Web-based startups, so that is what I wrote about. MORE

How agile deployment of products can affect a company''s business model in unintended ways For the last 75 years, products (both durable goods and software) were built via waterfall development. Marketing delivers a "requirements" document to engineering. MORE

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, October 20, 2008 The engineering managers lament I was inspired to write The product managers lament while meeting with a startup struggling to figure out what had gone wrong with their product development process. Last week, I found myself in a similar situation, but this time talking to the engineering manager. This engineering manager is a smart guy, and very experienced. And why is the engineering manager suffering so badly? MORE

I spent some time with his company before the conference and discussed ways to get started with continuousdeployment , including my experience introducing it at IMVU. He summarized that conversation well, so rather than re-tread that material, Ill quote it here: One thing that I was surprised to learn was that IMVU started out with continuousdeployment. Understanding these three factors makes it clear as to why continuousdeployment was a starting point for IMVU. MORE

Before we deploy code to Etsy.com, we check if the compiled routes and client code are up to date via Jenkins. And we neatly tie this into our continuousdeployment process. api engineering infrastructure mobile philosophy MORE

So I initially gravitated to the CTO title, and not VP of Engineering. And what about if deployment takes forever? Some options can improve the performance of the softare at the expense of readability, deployability, or scalability. MORE

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, September 7, 2008 Customer Development Engineering Yesterday, I had the opportunity to guest lecture again in Steve Blank s entrepreneurship class at the Berkeley-Columbia executive MBA program. In addition to presenting the IMVU case, we tried for the first time to do an overview of a software engineering methodology that integrates practices from agile software development with Steves method of Customer Development. MORE

I’ve become a big advocate of true Agile development (partly because of my experience with Rally Software – the leader in Agile software development environments) and – more recently – the notion of trying to get to continuousdeployment which has been popularized by Eric Ries. And, rather than have it be an “engineering thing”, you can (and should) make it a full company thing. Over the years, a number of companies I’ve been an investor in have had hackathons. MORE

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, February 16, 2009 Continuousdeployment with downloads One of my goals in writing posts about topics like continuousdeployment is the hope that people will take those ideas and apply them to new situations - and then share what they learn with the rest of us. So I was excited to read a recent post about applying the concept of continuousdeployment to that thickest-of-all-clients, the MMOG. MORE

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, February 10, 2009 Continuousdeployment and continuous learning At long last, some of the actual implementers of the advanced systems we built at IMVU for rapid deployment and rapid response are starting to write about it. MORE

Change to application code (deploys) are opportunities for failure. To track time-based events, the value sent for the metric can simply be “1″ Erik Kastner added this right into our code deployment tool so that every single deploy is automatically tracked. We can mix our code deployments right into the graph of PHP warnings we saw above. Combined with engineers pairing up for code reviews, we catch most issues before they get deployed. MORE

Since we are a company with a continuousdeployment development process, we do this on a daily basis and as an result get a significant number of new messages to be translated along with changes or deletions of existing ones that have already been translated. Etsy’s Search Team has integrated Lucene / Solr into our deployment infrastructure allowing for Solr configuration, Java-based indexers, and query parsing logic to go to production code in minutes. By: Diego Alonso. MORE

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, December 28, 2009 Continuousdeployment for mission-critical applications Having evangelized the concept of continuousdeployment for the past few years, Ive come into contact with almost every conceivable question, objection, or concern that people have about it. Or, phrased more hopefully, "I see how you can use continuousdeployment to run an online consumer service, but how can it be used for B2B software?" MORE

See Customer Development Engineering for my first stab at articulating the theory involved) Ferocious customer-centric rapid iteration, as exemplified by the Customer Development process. Since that time we've seen a massive change from product engineering to financial engineering. Case Study: Continuousdeployment makes releases n. Towards a new entrepreneurship ► 2009 (88) ► December (4) Continuousdeployment for mission-critical applica. MORE

Trying to answer that question at IMVU led me to discover Google AdWords and the world of search engine marketing. You declare how much someone clicking an advertisement is worth to you, and then the search engine does its best to get you as many clicks as it can at that price. Labels: search engine marketing 4comments: Tauya said. Case Study: Continuousdeployment makes releases n. MORE

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, February 20, 2009 Work in small batches Software should be designed, written, and deployed in small batches. Its had tremendous impact in many areas: continuousdeployment , just-in-time scalability , and even search engine marketing , to name a few. Every time an engineer checks in code, they are batching up a certain amount of work. This is easiest to see in deployment. MORE

In the last few years Agile and “ContinuousDeployment” has replaced Waterfall and transformed how companies big and small build products. But businesses are finding that ContinuousDeployment not only changes engineering but has ripple effects on the rest of its business model.

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, June 15, 2009 Why ContinuousDeployment? Of all the tactics I have advocated as part of the lean startup , none has provoked as many extreme reactions as continuousdeployment , a process that allows companies to release software in minutes instead of days, weeks, or months. My previous startup, IMVU , has used this process to deploy new code as often as an average of fifty times a day.

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, December 28, 2009 Continuousdeployment for mission-critical applications Having evangelized the concept of continuousdeployment for the past few years, Ive come into contact with almost every conceivable question, objection, or concern that people have about it. Or, phrased more hopefully, "I see how you can use continuousdeployment to run an online consumer service, but how can it be used for B2B software?"

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, January 18, 2010 Case Study: Continuousdeployment makes releases non-events The following is a case study of one entrepreneurs transition from a traditional development cycle to continuousdeployment.

How agile deployment of products can affect a company''s business model in unintended ways For the last 75 years, products (both durable goods and software) were built via waterfall development. Marketing delivers a "requirements" document to engineering.

In which Etsy transforms its app release process by aligning it with its philosophy for web deploys. Deploying code should be easy. It should happen often, and it should involve its engineers. For Etsyweb, this looks like continuousdeployment.

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, February 10, 2009 Continuousdeployment and continuous learning At long last, some of the actual implementers of the advanced systems we built at IMVU for rapid deployment and rapid response are starting to write about it.

If you aren’t familiar with Deployinator, it’s a tool we wrote to deploy code to Etsy.com. We deploy code about 40 times per day. Within Deployinator, we call each of these independent deployments “stacks”. Deploys are now separate unix processes with descriptive proc titles.

The numerous jobs on our dashboard were great for pinpointing where the failures were, but it was difficult to determine at which stage of the deploy pipeline the failures existed. We needed some way to communicate the test status at each stage of the deployment pipeline.

Change to application code (deploys) are opportunities for failure. To track time-based events, the value sent for the metric can simply be “1″ Erik Kastner added this right into our code deployment tool so that every single deploy is automatically tracked. We can mix our code deployments right into the graph of PHP warnings we saw above. Combined with engineers pairing up for code reviews, we catch most issues before they get deployed.

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, February 16, 2009 Continuousdeployment with downloads One of my goals in writing posts about topics like continuousdeployment is the hope that people will take those ideas and apply them to new situations - and then share what they learn with the rest of us. So I was excited to read a recent post about applying the concept of continuousdeployment to that thickest-of-all-clients, the MMOG.

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, October 20, 2008 The engineering managers lament I was inspired to write The product managers lament while meeting with a startup struggling to figure out what had gone wrong with their product development process. Last week, I found myself in a similar situation, but this time talking to the engineering manager. This engineering manager is a smart guy, and very experienced. And why is the engineering manager suffering so badly?

At Etsy, it’s not just engineers who write and deploy code – our designers and product managers regularly do too. In the past year, 70 employees have completed engineering rotations. This includes time spent training and the deploy itself.

In this post we explore some of the engineering challenges we faced in building a social commerce feature like the gift recommender. At Etsy, we build our system in a continuouslydeployed environment which allows us to quickly iterate and experiment. This holiday season we launched a redesigned version of a product we call “Gift Ideas for Your Friends”.

In which Etsy transforms its app release process by aligning it with its philosophy for web deploys. Deploying code should be easy. It should happen often, and it should involve its engineers. For Etsyweb, this looks like continuousdeployment.

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, February 10, 2009 Continuousdeployment and continuous learning At long last, some of the actual implementers of the advanced systems we built at IMVU for rapid deployment and rapid response are starting to write about it.

If you aren’t familiar with Deployinator, it’s a tool we wrote to deploy code to Etsy.com. We deploy code about 40 times per day. Within Deployinator, we call each of these independent deployments “stacks”. Deploys are now separate unix processes with descriptive proc titles.

by Samantha Lynch & Elizabeth Trongone Having prior product management experience in companies like Birchbox, Warby Parker and Group Commerce, we sought to continue to hone our product management skills through the lens of Launching Technology Ventures. Throughout our time working with Threadflip, we collected learnings on working with engineers, recruiting users and administering tests and interviews. Certain critical pain points and areas of confusion came up continuously.

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, September 7, 2008 Customer Development Engineering Yesterday, I had the opportunity to guest lecture again in Steve Blank s entrepreneurship class at the Berkeley-Columbia executive MBA program. In addition to presenting the IMVU case, we tried for the first time to do an overview of a software engineering methodology that integrates practices from agile software development with Steves method of Customer Development.

In the talk, I go into the philosophical reasons why continuousdeployment makes engineers happy, how radically decentralizing authority and thinking of your team as a community optimize for happiness, and the how our approach to tooling makes everything work. engineering philosophy videoA few weeks ago, I gave a talk at Railsconf in Baltimore about how we optimize for developer happiness at Etsy.

Continuing down this path we would have exhausted space and power in our datacenters. It’s tied into our continuousdeployment system, moving along with up to 60 deploys per day for etsy.com. api engineering infrastructure mobile operations philosophy API PHP

Before we deploy code to Etsy.com, we check if the compiled routes and client code are up to date via Jenkins. And we neatly tie this into our continuousdeployment process. api engineering infrastructure mobile philosophy

Continuousdeployment, the practice of pushing your code live the moment its ready, is absolutely essential for product hackers. engineering people philosophy bad idea mean time between failures meaningless death

We also deployed the site to production 517 times with changes from over 70 unique individuals. We’ve written about how we do it here on Etsy’s engineering blog (look here , here , and here for a sampling) but we’ve never explained it all in one place, in person, with free beer. “ContinuousDeployment: the Why and How (Kellan Elliott-McCrea, VP of Engineering). Members of the Etsy engineering team will be hanging out.

They form an important part of our continuousdeployment pipeline along with one-button deploys, fast unit and functional tests, copious amounts of graphing, and a fantastic development environment to make sure code flows safely and securely to production. Nothing particularly exotic but they help make the code readable and consistent across an ever growing engineering department. engineering infrastructure security

Trying to answer that question at IMVU led me to discover Google AdWords and the world of search engine marketing. You declare how much someone clicking an advertisement is worth to you, and then the search engine does its best to get you as many clicks as it can at that price. Labels: search engine marketing 4comments: Tauya said. Case Study: Continuousdeployment makes releases n.

Since we are a company with a continuousdeployment development process, we do this on a daily basis and as an result get a significant number of new messages to be translated along with changes or deletions of existing ones that have already been translated. Etsy’s Search Team has integrated Lucene / Solr into our deployment infrastructure allowing for Solr configuration, Java-based indexers, and query parsing logic to go to production code in minutes. By: Diego Alonso.

In addition to our production infrastructure, every engineer and designer also have their own VM to develop on the Etsy stack (see this post for details). We have about 30 engineers regularly making changes to our cookbooks. For infrastructure changes we have the same continuousdeployment mentality. continuouslydeployed. hide a change behind a rollout flag and makes it easier for engineers that are. engineering infrastructure operations

We wanted to give you a rundown of what’s in store, along with particular insight into two of the workshops we’re most excited to have lined up for Gold and VIP attendee s—one session with Jez Humble on implementing continuous delivery and one with Alistair Croll on Lean analytics for corporate entrepreneurs. To demonstrate the kind of thing we have in mind, we spoke to Jez Humble, who will lead a workshop, Continuous Delivery: Deploy Safer, Learn Faster.

So, in the example above, wed have to take five corrective actions: bring the site back up remove the bad code help so-and-so understand why his code doesnt work as written train so-and-so in the principles of TDD change the new engineer orientation to include TDD I have come to believe that this technique should be used for all kinds of defects, not just site outages. By continuously adjusting, we eventually build up a robust series of defenses that prevent problems from happening.

And they can benefit from the speed and discipline of starting with a minimum viable product and then learning and iterating continuously. Many lean startups are ambitious and are able to deploy large amounts of capital. Case Study: Continuousdeployment makes releases n.

Finding great engineers is hard; figuring out whos good is even harder. For software engineers, I think this absolutely has to be a programming problem solved on a whiteboard. I have found this quite rare in engineers. Many of us engineers are strong introverts, without fantastic people skills. To test for empathy, I always make sure that engineers have one or two interviews with people of wildly different background, like a member of our production art department.

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, February 20, 2009 Work in small batches Software should be designed, written, and deployed in small batches. Its had tremendous impact in many areas: continuousdeployment , just-in-time scalability , and even search engine marketing , to name a few. Every time an engineer checks in code, they are batching up a certain amount of work. This is easiest to see in deployment.

Over the years, our product, engineering, and member-facing organizations have developed practices and approaches to support our community during the intensity of the holidays. Engineers went from deploying five times a day to once a day.

PayPal, under the leadership of David Marcus and Bill Scott, re-defining and re-engineering itself by embracing Lean Startup to improve the product experience. My personal background was as an engineer and my companies had been Web-based startups, so that is what I wrote about.

I spent some time with his company before the conference and discussed ways to get started with continuousdeployment , including my experience introducing it at IMVU. He summarized that conversation well, so rather than re-tread that material, Ill quote it here: One thing that I was surprised to learn was that IMVU started out with continuousdeployment. Understanding these three factors makes it clear as to why continuousdeployment was a starting point for IMVU.

I’ve become a big advocate of true Agile development (partly because of my experience with Rally Software – the leader in Agile software development environments) and – more recently – the notion of trying to get to continuousdeployment which has been popularized by Eric Ries. And, rather than have it be an “engineering thing”, you can (and should) make it a full company thing. Over the years, a number of companies I’ve been an investor in have had hackathons.

Etsy engineers have a wide variety of backgrounds, strengths, and weaknesses, so there are no engineering skills we can take for granted. And there are things you can’t just assume engineers will learn for themselves because you throw a codebase and a workflow at them. To that end, I recently wrote two “Testing 101″ materials for use by all Etsy engineers.

So I initially gravitated to the CTO title, and not VP of Engineering. And what about if deployment takes forever? Some options can improve the performance of the softare at the expense of readability, deployability, or scalability.

See Customer Development Engineering for my first stab at articulating the theory involved) Ferocious customer-centric rapid iteration, as exemplified by the Customer Development process. Since that time we've seen a massive change from product engineering to financial engineering. Case Study: Continuousdeployment makes releases n. Towards a new entrepreneurship ► 2009 (88) ► December (4) Continuousdeployment for mission-critical applica.

That is, once you’re no longer a small company and you have some success, how do you execute and continue to grow through innovation? We work in prototypically four-week iterations, with quality engineers and software developers working in close collaboration. Here''s the simplest form of that cycle: Week -1 - Planning/End-of-Cycle - Software engineers are planning: writing specifications, doing light prototyping, and experimentation.

I break the answer to that question down into three engines: Viral - this is the business model identified in the presentation as "Get Users." Thats why eBay advertises on search engines, and Facebook doesnt. Labels: search engine marketing 0comments: New comments are not allowed. Case Study: Continuousdeployment makes releases n. Towards a new entrepreneurship ► 2009 (88) ► December (4) Continuousdeployment for mission-critical applica.

As the CTO/VP Engineering, I was the worst offender. That means that I (and other engineers) were able to participate in the problem team discussions. Such discussions would have been impossible in our execution-oriented engineering team meetings. Most engineers naturally think about repurposing the technology platform, and this is a common pattern. As an engineer thinking of doing a startup applying Steven's approach, your teachings are pure gold!

Case Study: Continuousdeployment makes releases n. Towards a new entrepreneurship ▼ 2009 (88) ► December (4) Continuousdeployment for mission-critical applica. Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, August 3, 2009 Minimum Viable Product: a guide One of the most important lean startup techniques is called the minimum viable product. Its power is matched only by the amount of confusion that it causes, because its actually quite hard to do.

Editor’s Note: The following is a guest post by James Donelan , the VP of engineering at MuleSoft , provider of the world’s most widely used integration platform. Use a continuous delivery model to release new features quickly with the least amount of friction.